Phare Tower
Award-winning American architect Thom Mayne is trusted to design a building in Paris that will be nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower and aims for new heights in innovation. On November 24, Morphosis, his famous firm, won in a competition to design the “Phare,” means it Beacon/Lighthouse Tower, in La Défense, an area of office towers west of Paris. The 68 stories building are exactly located between the Grande Arche and the 1958 exhibition hall CNIT. Imagine it as an elegant silhouette covered with a smooth metal skin, a flickering form, scattered ‘net’ at bottom and stick out warded shoots that led some to judge him the architect of dislocation.
Development company Unibail, in partnership with EPAD, notes the Morphosis project as symbol of breaking the past, also decided to give Mayne faith to show his softer personality. “I’ve shown a softer side; my wife is really teasing me,” Mr. Mayne, 62, said in an interview at Morphosis, his firm in Santa Monica. “The sensuousness of Paris found its way into the project.”
Thom Mayne equalized the building as a “layered dress” or a woman’s slip. “The skin becomes primary, the body secondary,” he admitted. “It becomes metabolic, the skin. It moves.”
Mayne said the building still needed more perfection, because he only spent 3 months in development before deadline. While the outer skin is currently perforated stainless steel for first draft, it might be another finishing by the time he is finished. For studying the site he had hired a fashion photographer to shoot the site over an extended period, taking the picture at different times as he revolved around it, so Mayne can be able to catch the sense of how the light shifts throughout the day and seasons.
He even doesn’t really sure what will happen in the future, with his usual nature. “I produce something, attack it, it moves, it changes, it responds to the nature of that critique, it happens reiteratively till we’ve exhausted the idea. Then it’s complete, it’s done. I’m not done. I just started.”
Approximately completed in 2012 with estimated cost of almost $1.2 billion, it signs the first step in the revitalization of the site. It will be easily the tallest office building in Paris, surpassing the 180-meter Montparnasse Tower, but shorter than the 324-meter Eiffel Tower.
While the forms has not fixed yet, the concept absolutely remains ideal: Mayne breaks down the matters before assemble them together he reverses conventional methods. A waving dual skin on the southern side comprises a layer of glass over steel panels that have been perforated for transparent effect while limiting heat gain. The northern side which acts as a face is clear-glazed. At the bottom, a flap opens in the building’s skin remind a slit skirt inspired from a sexy woman using nice dress, toring inside of the office floors around a 197-foot-high lobby, opens the building to the public and the nearest mass transit station, creating what Mayne describes as a “vertical piazza” contiguous with an abstract steel frames.
The design features several eco-friendly characteristics in addition to southern shading. The tower rises 984 feet above the plaza to a ragged top edge of steel, constituting what the architects call a “wind farm,” which will provide some electricity to the fans in the building’s natural ventilation system. Simultaneously to be built in La Défense is the 50-story Generali by French architects Valode et Pistre, who have put giant wind turbines and an army of solar panels on top of their tower to help generate electricity and hot water.”It’s about an icon and one of the major buildings in Paris,” said Mayne.
Mayne’s winning was an ironic news for Jean Nouvel, one of the 10 architects in the competition that included big architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster, because he had already designed a tower for the Phare ~also known as Tour Signal~ site in 1989; his cylindrical “Tour Sans Fin” and it was never built until nowadays.Again we should thank to Mayne’s wife for inspiring him with the sexy execution of resistance architecture.
